image text special shop

'Strawberry Hill', a Group Show at The Orange Garden, London

I think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called realities of life for dreams - Horace Walpole (1776)

Drawing inspiration from Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, the exhibition aims to create an ideal setting to act in defiance towards aesthetic and social conventions. With the realisation of Strawberry Hill, Walpole appropriated and employed Gothic architectural elements and themes in order to challenge the ideologically conservative and patriarchal society that surrounded him. Walpole considered his house on Strawberry Hill to be a complex projection of his subjectivity, a place that would exemplify artistic freedom, lawlessness and liberty - the ideal setting for his personal Gothic fantasy.

Today, the Gothic imaginary assumes a variety of forms and is channeled across different media, creeping its way through the corridors of our brains, feeding on the unfamiliarity of the familiar. The Gothic is defined by Halberstam as “a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite the normal, healthy, and the pure”, skewing our given truths through the transgression of categorical distinction and its emphasis on duality. The Gothic flips reality upside down, functioning as a necessary articulation of the repressed underside of society’s humanistic values, allowing the true monster within ourselves to de-monstrate itself. It becomes a space in which the boundaries of good and evil dissolve and where fantasy coexists with reality - echoing the all-too-relevant motto of William Burrough’s imaginary Interzone City in Naked Lunch, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”.

Strawberry Hill
serves as a nexus for a variety of shared anxieties, such as the intrusion of the Other into everyday life, fears of unknown due from the un-processable changes of technological advances, and the desire for behavioural alterity.

Fari Quae Sentiat
, “Say what one feels”, reads the motto above the chimney in the library of Strawberry Hill. 

24.1.20 — 31.1.20

Edoardo Caimi, Roxman Gatt, Roxanne Jackson, Sang Woo Kim, India Nielsen, Avery Noyes, Benjamin E. Slinger, Andrew Sunderland and Frances Wilks

The Orange Garden

'ABSINTHE', Group Show Curated by PLAGUE at Smena, Kazan

'Pupila' by Elizabeth Burmann Littin at Two seven two gallery, Toronto

'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London

Next Page